Crackdowns on potential voter fraud fuel worries about ballot access in November
A sign reading “Vote” is displayed on the side of a booth as a voter casts a ballot in San Francisco on Nov. 8, 2016.
bring proper identification that substantially matches their registration.
“This is a publicity stunt that the media falls for year after year,” said Candice Broce, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state, noting that a similar exact match law was recently upheld in Florida by a federal appeals court.
“The 53,000 Georgians cited in their complaint can vote in the November 6th election,” she said. “Any claims to the contrary are politically motivated and utterly false.”
The controversy in North Carolina elicited a more bipartisan uproar, with Republicans and Democrats alike decrying the efforts of Robert Higdon Jr., the U.S. attorney for Eastern District of North Carolina and a Trump appointee, to secure millions of voting records from 44 counties in the eastern half of the state.
The demand for documents came just days after Higdon’s office, in concert with ICE, issued indictments charging 19 foreign nationals of voting illegally in the 2016 elections.
State election officials argued that responding to the subpoenas would require compiling more than 20 million documents and would burden tiny electoral offices while they were already printing ballots and making other preparations for the November elections.
A spokesman for the State Board of Elections said the U.S. attorney agreed to wait until January for the documents.
Higdon’s office declined to answer questions about the subpoenas, citing an active grand-jury investigation. ICE officials also declined to comment.
The demand could cast a chilling effect among voters worried about the privacy of their voting records, state officials said, and frighten naturalized immigrants into wondering about their right to vote.
“The scope is immense.
It’s incredible. The amount of information they’re seeking – I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” said Andy Penry, chairman of the state electoral board.
“It would be nice if the proponents would give us some information to justify the breadth and scope of the subpoenas,” said Penry, a Democrat. “In the absence of that, there are going to be a lot of people who are going to think that this is an effort to buttress false narratives of voter fraud.”
Election officials say they support efforts to investigate and stop improper voting – and in fact, Higdon’s indictments resulted from an audit that the State Board of Elections conducted after the 2016 election, which showed that more than 400 people cast ballots improperly because of felony convictions, while an additional 41 documented noncitizens cast ballots.
But many believe that such investigations should remain the province of state and local officials – not the federal government.
Stacy Eggers IV, a Republican appointee to the electoral board who doesn’t often vote with his Democratic colleagues, joined the unanimous vote to file a court motion to quash the subpoenas. He said he was alarmed by the demand for absentee ballots, which include a number that can be traced back to a voter - and to how he or she voted. Close to half the electorate in the state voted absentee in 2016, he said.
“If there is election fraud, we want to have it investigated, because it lessens the power of legitimate voters,” Eggers said. “But what does a federal investigative body need with the votes of 50 percent of the electorate in eastern North Carolina? That’s my biggest concern.”
Fueling the debate are recent problems with state programs in Pennsylvania and California aimed at increasing
voter registration that have produced tens of thousands of registration errors.
In California, mistakes in the state’s new “Motor Voter” program – which began automatically registering eligible voters through the Department of Motor Vehicles in April – led to as many as 100,000 registration errors, including some voters being registered twice and some with their party affiliation improperly switched. In addition, 1,500 ineligible people were registered, including some noncitizens, Secretary of State Alex Padilla said in a news conference Tuesday.
State Republicans and Democrats, including Padilla, agree that the state’s new motor voter program may need to be suspended.
Jim Patterson, a Republican state assemblyman from Fresno who led the effort to uncover and fix the problems, said that because of errors, “many, many Californians are now beginning to call into question the sanctity of the voter rolls and the accuracy of their own voter registration.”
Patterson said he is confident that voters and local registrars have time to correct the problems before Election Day.
In Pennsylvania, officials realized in 2017 that a poorly designed touchscreen system for applying for driver’s licenses had prompted thousands of noncitizens to register to vote.
A conservative group called the Public Interest Law Firm (PILF) sued Pennsylvania in February seeking its election records, claiming that as many as 100,000 noncitizens may be registered to vote.
Such rhetoric alarms voting rights advocates, who believe that groups such as PILF are pushing to create political support for purging immigrant voters from election rolls without certainty that they are ineligible to vote.
PILF spokesman Logan Churchwell said his group wants to bring the same due diligence to the data that state election officials claim they do. He also disputed the idea that his group’s lawsuits, or stricter voting requirements such as voter ID laws, have a chilling effect on turnout.
“Why would it have a chilling effect on a U.S. citizen?” he asked. “It’s a public service to them.”
State officials said they have fixed the touch-screen system and said there is no evidence that 100,000 noncitizens are registered to vote. Officials are still assessing how many improper voters were registered.